5 berries, 5 happy thoughts

1. Dean comes home tonight after 7 sleeps away. The cats are good company but their conversation skills are limited, they cannot pick me up and whirl me around with glee, and their smiles do not cause my heart to beat faster.

2. I have been reading some interesting blogs lately, one in particular that has much to say about how far everything in the church falls short of the mark. He moans about the lack of culture and excellence and depth in the evangelical community, pointing out its self-serving programs and mediocre art and music as examples of how far we have strayed. I agree, we are weak and poor and wretched, finding it easy to wander away from our creator instead stepping towards him. We are but dust. I wanted to argue: finer music, larger vocabularies, more complex paintings, and elitist cultural attitudes will not prove to be the church's salvation, buddy! Somewhere in the midst of my frustration and discouragement and anger towards the burdens these half-truths and slashing phrases were placing on the common follower of Jesus, I heard the Father say that he loves dust. He breathes life into dust (see Genesis 2). His Spirit can make the finest creation out of simple dirt. Dirty dirt. Shapeless dirt. Breathe on us again.

3. Saturday did not turn out the way I had hoped. Some days things just don't go according to the script in my head, and where I had hoped to leap and dance and live life large, I was bent low and disappointed in my weakness. Sunday morning I lay in bed and asked God what he thought about my performance the day before. This song floated through my head and continued serenading me all day: You take me the way I am (by Ingrid Michaelson). Weakness and shortcoming really have nothing to do with the quantity and quality of what is available 24/7 from the one who defines himself as LOVE.

4. I like going to the bathroom. There is something inherently satisfying and relieving about eliminating waste from your body. Of course, we do not talk about these things openly; we have sanitised these daily events and hidden them from view. But the fact is God made our bodies to take in both those things we need and those things that we don't (they are all mixed together in the foods we eat), and given our bodies the incredible ability to discern between the two and to take the valuable nutrients and let the other stuff go. He made letting go of waste an urge in us that needs to be satisfied and accompanied it with relief and a sense of well-being and lightness. How cool is that? Would that I could just as easily let go of all my emotional, spiritual, and personal waste.

5. Today was the first day of my intermediate French course. I sat beside Jean (the French equivalent for John) who sounds incredibly French to me, but admitted that after living here for more than 20 years, he still struggles to have a casual conversation. He is funny and friendly and made me enjoy the class that much more. I am blessed to have a patient teacher who wants to see us improve and learn, no matter what our level and insists that we never let fear or discouragement stand in our way. I look forward to more of the same tomorrow.

I am going to eat those blueberries now.

Names of God

The Hebrew word "YHWH" (read from right to left) This past Sunday I gave a talk on the Names of God, the beginning of a series on this topic. This first talk was to be a gentle introduction so I thought it wouldn't take too many hours of preparation. Well, I quickly discovered that the research is almost bottomless; every time I thought I had a somewhat definitive list of names, I found another source which added a few more or gave a different twist on some of the names I had already come across. After several hours I was getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data (and that was only looking at the Hebrew Bible). I wondered how I could present this to people in an orderly and accessible fashion and within a reasonable time frame. Not everyone is up for a 3-hour lecture crammed full of detail on a Sunday morning. So I took a break and spent a bit of time meditating on this problem and asking the Spirit for guidance. And then I thought that being overwhelmed by Go

it's a mad mad mad world (of theology)

The mad dash for the end of term has begun. I have finished all my required readings and have jumped into research reading. One of my papers is on the madness of theology (the correlation seems more obvious to some of us than to others). Truly inspiring stuff, I am finding. Let me share a few quotes here: There is a certain madness in Christianity – in a desert God who is jealous and passionate, in a saviour who speaks in apocalyptic terms, in a life of sacrificial love, in the scandal of particularity. In principle, a confessional theology should bear the mark of this madness, but the mark or wound must constantly be renewed. - Walter Lowe, "Postmodern Theology" in The Oxford Handbook of Systematic Theology , 2007. “In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the ‘Kingdom of God’ are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the ‘world,’ resulting in what I call a ‘sacred anarchy.’ Consider but a sampling o

comedic timing

Comic by Joel Micah Harris at xkcd.com One of my favourite jokes goes like this: Knock, knock. Who's there? Interrupting cow Interrupting cow w--- Moooooooo!! Timing is important in both drama and comedy. A well-paced story draws the audience in and helps it invest in the characters, while a tale too hastily told or too long drawn out will fail to engage anyone. Surprise - something which interrupts the expected - is a creative use of timing and integral to any good story. If someone is reading a novel and everything unfolds in a predictable manner, they will probably wonder why they bothered reading the book. And so it is in life. Having life be predictable all of the time is not as calming as it sounds. We love surprises, especially good surprises like birthday parties, gifts, marriage proposals, and finding something that we thought was lost. Surprises are an important part of humour. A good joke is funny because it goes to a place you didn't expect it to go. Sim

outWORD by Matte Downey

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